Friday, June 26, 2015

Your Chordal List of Hates

Two new Stephin Merritt songs, Lo and La, for Lola the rat terrier who steals the show.

It wasn't Thursday Night Pints (which are no more) though I did have a pint with a friend last night. She's an unabashed mainstream Democrat and enthusiastic Inevitability proponent. It's important to her that a woman wins POTUS, and frankly that symbolism is the ONLY reason I don't find the thought of Inevitability A-to-Z repugnant. Think of how it will make rightwingers nuts, N said. If on the day after Obama won POTUS in 2008, I said, you'd told me that in 2015 there would be a mass public revulsion against the Confederate flag with concurrent rightwing freakout and that conservative SCOTUS judges would uphold a health care bill deemed socialist by rightwingers with concurrent rightwing freakout, and these had happened in the same week, I not only wouldn't believe you but would have signed on for that comedy blockbuster in a nanosecond. N said, I know you're disappointed with Democrats in particular and Obama in general, but the anti-Confederacy bullshit doesn't make you happy? I haven't been taking my daily tribal viagra for years, I said, I can't achieve a boner much less a flaggasm.

UPDATE! And now Scalia, Alito, and Thomas lose on gay marriage. I am small enough, I confess, to relish the thought of theirheads exploding.

UPDATE! OK, I confess, I'm feeling some tiny reawakening of schadenfreude over this one.

3 comments:

2) in the time i've been here maryland has not elected the lt. gov. to the top spot - not the woman related to the murdered president, not the man whose mother was swiss - so i don't think our man martin is particularly ineffective in the political sphere - both these candidates had a major disadvantage in so tradition-minded a state

2a) i don't like martin attacking bernie, but as i haven't given martin any money i guess i can't complain

3) perhaps, through a combination of circumstances, it could be our CURRENT lt. gov. who makes history by taking office in annapolis - who knows if it's good or bad?

4) you link to dark ecologies, where there is a review of james c. scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

scott's notions for any future initiative toward a post-capitalist society:

Take small steps. In an experimental approach to social change, presume that we cannot know the consequences of our interventions in advance. Given this postulate of ignorance, prefer wherever possible to take a small step, stand back, observe, and then plan the next small move. As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane metaphorically described the advantages of smallness: “You can drop a mouse down a thousand yard mineshaft; and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man broken, a horse splashes.” (p. 345)

Favor reversibility. Prefer interventions that can easily be undone if they turn out to be mistakes. Irreversible interventions have irreversible consequences. Interventions into ecosystems require particular care in this respect, given our great ignorance about how they interact. Aldo Leopold captured the spirit of caution required: “The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts.”(p. 345)

Plan on surprises. Choose plans that allow the largest accommodation to the unforeseen. In agricultural schemes this may mean choosing and preparing land so that it can grow any of several crops. In planning housing, it would mean “designing in” flexibility for accommodating changes in family structures or living styles. In a factory it may mean selecting a location, layout, or piece of machinery that allows for new processes, materials, or product lines down the road. (p. 345)

Plan on human inventiveness. Always plan under the assumption that those who become involved in the project later will have or will develop the experience and insight to improve on the design.(p. 345)

I'm going to kindly disagree w you re: Maryland: between Baltimore City, Moco, PG, Howard, and now a still minority but substantially growing in Democrats Frederick and Baltimore counties, it takes remarkable incompetence on the part of Maryland Democratic Party to lose the governorship.

Fuck Martin O'Malley, who is already proving there is no act of toadying he won't do to be either Inevitability's running-mate or in Inevitability's cabinet